On the Suffering of Non-Human Animals

Animal life is “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” But this gloomy Hobbesian description must be balanced by the recognition that a suffering animal is not a man suffering as an animal suffers. We must discipline our tendency to project and imagine. To imagine that a cat dying of cancer suffers as a man dying of cancer suffers is to engage in anthropomorphic projection. “Nature red in tooth and claw” is perhaps less horrible than we imagine it to be. This is not to deny that animals suffer, let alone to embrace the Cartesian absurdity that animals are machines. The point is to not make things worse than they are through inept mental moves.

Generic and Specific Problems of Evil

Substack latest.

The nature and tractability of the problem depends on the type of theism espoused.

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Vito Caiati comments:

I very much profited from the short essay “Generic and Specific Problems of Evil” that you posted on Substack yesterday. I have read it several times, and, if viewed from the perspective of the ultimate destiny of the members of our species alone, I see the merit of your claim that “It is arguable that there is no insoluble problem of evil for theists-A, . . . [those who regard] this world [as] a ‘vale of soul-making’ (the phrase is from John Keats) in which human beings, exercising free will, make themselves worthy, or fail to make themselves worthy, of communion with God. Combine this soul-making idea with post-mortem existence, and the existence of purgatory but not hell, and we have perhaps the elements of a solution to the problem of evil.”

However, what about non-human animals, who “Despite being wholly corporeal, . . . enjoy and suffer sentience: they are the subjects of conscious states, contra Descartes. Among these conscious states are non-intentional states such as pleasure and pain, but also . . . intentional (object-directed) states such as affection and anger” (Maverick Philosopher, “Soteriology for Brutes,”3/21/2019)?  

It seems to me, who, as you know, is a philosophic neophyte in these matters, that the theist-A operates with too narrow a perspective on sentience, for ultimate value is placed only on those sentient beings that are rational and hence capable to abstract thought and moral judgments.  The suffering of all the others, including the highest mammals, counts very little or not at all; it certainly does not figure in the soteriology of, say, Christianity, which is obsessively centered on human sin and the need for salvation from it, rather than on the agony and death that permeates the natural world.  Perhaps “death is the wages of sin” for mankind, but what explains the agonizing deaths of our fellow sentient creatures that have not sinned?  Only by remaining in his sin/redemption theory of salvation, which is necessarily restricted to human beings, can theist-A be more reconciled to the existence of evil.  

None of these may be worth your time, but I wanted to share it with you, since it is one of the central concerns of my intellectual and emotional life.

You have pointed out a serious lacuna in my discussion, Vito.  I focused on moral and natural evil as it pertains to human animals but left out of account the natural evil, including both physical and mental suffering, that besets non-human animals.  I will now try to formulate your objection to me as trenchantly as I can.  'You' in what follows refers to me!

1) You maintain that the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of God is considerably more tractable if we humans survive our bodily deaths  and come to enjoy (after a period of purgation) eternal bliss. 

2) You also argue that "It is dialectically unfair for atheists to argue against all (classical) theists from the fact of the evil in this world when . . . some theists believe that the transient evils of this short life are far outweighed by the unending bliss of the world to come."

3) You are presenting a sort of "All's well that ends well" response to moral and natural evil.  You are arguing that the evils of this life are far outweighed and almost completely made up for by the unending bliss of the world to come, so much so that the the 'problem' of evil vanishes for those who subscribe to the specific theism that you call Theism-A.

4) You ignore, however, the problem of animal pain which is certainly real. (We both reject as preposterous the Cartesian view that non-human animals are insensate or non-sentient.) Given that non-human animals are not spiritual beings as we are, and do not survive their bodily deaths, there is no redemption for them: their horrific suffering — imagine the physical pain and mental terror of being eaten alive! — is in no way recompensed or outweighed.  And given how many species of non-human critter there are, and how many specimens per species, and how long these animals existed before man made the scene, there is a VAST amount of evil that goes unredeemed.

5) Your argument therefore fails to get God off the hook. 

I take this objection seriously and I thank Dr. Caiati for raising it. At the moment, three possible lines of response occur to me, assuming that there is no Cartesian way out.

A. We can take something like the  line that David Bentley Hart champions against Edward Feser, which I briefly discussed in "Soteriology for Brutes?" (linked above) namely, that animals do survive their bodily deaths and 'go to heaven.' (Lacking as they do free will, I see no reason to posit purgatory or hell for them.  The savagery of a tiger devouring its prey alive is amoral unlike the savagery of humans. No homo is literally homini lupus.)

B. Without embracing Cartesianism, one might argue that we are engaging in illicit anthropomorphic projection when we project into animals our terrors and physical pains.  One might to try to argue that their sufferings, while real,  are next to nothing as compared to ours and don't really count very much or at all when it comes to the problem of evil.

C.  One might take a mysterian tack. God exists and evil exists. Therefore, they co-exist, whence it follows that it is possible that they co-exist. The fact that we cannot understand how it possible reflects poorly on our cognitive architecture but has no tendency to show that God and evil do not co-exist.  Of course, if one took a line like this, one could evade the particulars of my Substack proposal.

While (B) strikes me as lame, (A) and (C) show promise, (A) more than (C).

ComBox now open.

ADDENDUM (9/17)

This morning I found a passage in Berdyaev that supports Dr. Caiati's intuitions about animal suffering from a broadly Christian perspective.

The death of the least and most miserable creature is unendurable, and if it is irremediable, the world cannot be accepted and justified. All and everything must be raised to eternal life. This means that the principle of eternal being must be affirmed in relation to human beings, animals, plants and even inanimate things. [. . .] Christ's love of the world and for man is victory over the powers of death and the gift of abundant life. (Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, tr. Natalie Duddington, Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p. 253.)

The (febrile) Russian existentialist is making a surprisingly radical claim here. He is maintaining that the existence of the world is justified and our lives in it are affirmable as worth living only if absolutely everything is redeemed and preserved in the end, not only everything living, but the inanimate as well.  Somehow everything temporal must be somehow cancelled and preserved — aufgehoben in Hegel's sense  — in eternity.  How the inanimate could be brought to eternal life is of course a thought transgressive of the discursive and hard by the boundary of the mystical.  

In Berdyaev as in Simone Weil, we are at the outer limits of the religious sensibility.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Recently Dead and Gone

As a sort of intro, The Who, My Generation. "I hope I die before I get old." My English readers will enjoy the video.

Charlie Watts at 80, 1941-2021. Rolling Stones, Sittin' on a Fence. A lovely tune. Trigger warning!  Under My Thumb. Eerily appropriate these days: Gimme Shelter

Don Everly at 84, 1937-2021. When Will I Be Loved?

Nanci Griffith at 68, 1953-2021. Boots of Spanish Leather. Bob would be proud.

B. J. Thomas at 78, 1942-2021. I Just Can't Help Believing

Lloyd Price at 88, 1933-2021. Stagger Lee. Personality

Chick Corea at 79, 1941-2021. Armando's Rhumba

Mary Wilson at 76, 1944-2021. Our Day Will Come

Jimmie Rodgers at 87. 1933-2021. Honeycomb

Phil Spector at 81, 1939-2021.  The Wall of Sound

Charley Pride at 82, 1938-2021. 

Len Barry at 78, 1942-2020. You Can't Sit Down

Jerry Jeff Walker at 78, 1942-2020. Mr. Bojangles

Spencer Davis at 81, 1939-2020. Gimme Some Lovin'

An Admiring but Critical Note on an Edmund Burke Quotation

A quotation and a question:

Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to [of] justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Edmund Burke, letter to François-Louis-Thibaut de Menonville, 1791, bolding added.

A fine statement to which I largely agree, but I have one reservation. An  external check upon the wills and appetites of individuals who will not check themselves is necessary if there is to be civil order.  But the administrators of the external check are cut from the same crooked timber as the rest of us.  Our trust in them must therefore be cautious and as limited as the power we grant them. The conservative assessment of human nature is sober and realistic: every true conservative knows that power goes to the heads of its possessors, and this regardless of how paltry the power may be. 

Who checks the checkers? Who keeps them in check?  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  The checkers cannot be expected to check themselves any more that the Roman Catholic hierarchy can be expected to check the concupiscence of its clerics and punish priestly paedophiles and ephebophiles with sufficient severity. They will protect their own first, setting the interests of the institution above the interests of those  they are supposed to serve.  The same goes for government which can degenerate into a self-serving hustle like any hustle.  So-called civil servants too often serve themselves first and those they are supposed to serve second if at all.

A sound conservatism must advocate checks and balances across the board with every individual and group kept in check and keeping in check.  For one example, armed civilians are needed to keep both the criminal element and government in check, just as government is need to keep armed civilians in check via the enactment and enforcement of reasonable gun laws.

A sound conservatism will not succumb to the authoritarian temptation; it must take on board as much of classical liberalism as is necessary to stymy the drift toward the totalitarian. The true conservative treads the via media between knee-pad Toryism and anything-goes libertarianism. 

I Walk the Line

Over at Facebook. The line between saying what needs to be said and being de-platformed. I don't much cotton to book burners and their latter-day equivalents. Free speech and open inquiry! Not for their own sakes, but in pursuit of the truth. Not 'my truth' or 'your truth,' but the truth.

A Proof of Individual Concepts?

This just in from Edward:

Proof that singular concepts (aka individual concepts) exist.

1. Common terms (‘cat’) and singular terms (‘this cat’, ‘Max’) exist.

2. These terms are meaningful, i.e. their meanings exist.

3. A concept is the meaning of a term.

4. Thus (from 1,2, 3) singular concepts, aka singular meanings, exist.

QED

This argument equivocates on 'meaning.' There are of course general and singular terms and they both have meanings if the meaning of a term is its extension, the (set of) things to which it applies. Accordingly, the meaning/extension of 'cat' is (the set of)  cats, and the meaning/extension of 'Max' is Max, or his singleton.  General terms also have meaning in the sense of intension.  'Cordate' and 'renate' are general terms that have the same extension but differ in intension.  But the singular term 'Max,' while it has an extension, lacks an intension.

So for both (1) and (2) to be true, the meaning of a term must be its extension. But for (3) to be true, the meaning of a term must be its intension. So the argument trades on an equivocation and is for that reason invalid.

Here is a sound argument:

5. A concept is the intension of a term.

6. Singular terms lack intensions.

7. If a term lacks an intension, then there is no concept the term expresses.

Therefore

8. Singular terms do not express concepts. (From 5, 6, 7)

9. If a term does not express a concept, then there exists no concept the term expresses.

Therefore

10. There are no singular/individual concepts.

Just ask yourself: how could there be a concept of precisely Max and nothing actually or possibly different from Max? Suppose that there is a definite description that Max alone satisfies in the actual world.  That description would express a concept that only one thing could bear or instantiate. But such a concept would not be singular but general since something else might have satisfied the description.   For there to be an individual concept of Max, Max himself would somehow  have to be a constituent of the concept. But that is impossible and for two reasons.  First, concepts reside in the mind but no cat is a constituent of anything in my mind.  Second, a concept is distinct from its bearer and can exist whether or not its bearer exists.  But the concept MAX, if there were such a concept, would not be wholly distinct from its bearer and could not exist without its bearer.

The individual qua individual cannot be conceptualized. My conceptual grasp of an individual such as Max is always and necessarily by way of general concepts: cat, domestic cat, black cat, Tuxedo cat, black male Tuxedo cat five years old and weighing 20 lbs,  cat presently in my visual field, this cat to which I am now pointing.  Note that Max need not be this cat to which I am presently pointing, whence it follows that the haecceity of Max himself  cannot be reached or grasped or conceptualized in the concept this cat to which I am presently pointing.

Care of Soul and Body

To care properly for the first, live each day as if it will be your last. To care properly for the second, live each day as if your supply of days is infinite. (Adapted from Evagrius Ponticus.)

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The mortalist body-abuser is one puzzling hombre.

Christopher Hitchens loved to drink and he loved to smoke and he knew that the synergistic effects of drinking like a fish and smoking like a chimney could lead, as it did in the case of Humphrey Bogart, to an untimely shuffling off of the mortal coil.  (Hamlet's soliloquy, Act 3, Scene 1) You would think that someone who was utterly convinced that he was nothing more than an animated body, a clever land mammal, would want to take care of  his body. Hitchens was not suicidal. He loved to write and he had writing projects planned out. He died of cancer of the esophagus at age 62 in 2011. Those of us who champion  free speech miss him greatly and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world.  

People think they have plenty of time. But it's later than you think. The Reaper Man is sharpening his scythe as we scribblers sharpen our pencils.

Intentionality, Singularity, and Individual Concepts

Herewith, some notes on R. M. Sainsbury, Intentionality without Exotica.  (Exotica are those items  that are "nonexistent, nonconcrete, or nonactual." (303) Examples include Superman and Arcadia.)

'Jack wants a sloop' could mean three different things. (a) There is a particular sloop Jack wants.  In this case, Jack's desire is externally singular.  Desire is an object-directed mental state, and in this case the object exists and is singular.

(b) There is no particular sloop Jack wants; what he wants is "relief from slooplessness" in Quine's phrase. In this case the desire, being "wholly non-specific," is not externally singular.  In fact, it is not singular at all.  Jack wants some sloop or other, but no particular sloop whether one that exists at present or one that is to be built.

(c) Jack wants a sloop of a certain description, one that, at the time of the initial desire, no external object satisfies. He contracts with a ship builder to build a sloop to his exact specifications, a sloop he dubs The Mary Jane. It turns out, however, that the sloop is never built.  In this case, Sainsbury tells us, the desire is not externally singular as in case (a), but internally singular:

The concept The Mary Jane that features in the content of the desire is the kind of concept appropriate to external singularity, though that kind of singularity is absent, so the desire counts as internally singular. The kind of concept that makes for singularity in thought is one produced by a concept-producing mechanism whose functional role is to generate concepts fit for using to think about individual things. I call such a concept an ‘‘individual concept’’ (Sainsbury 2005: 217ff). Individual concepts are individuated by the event in which they are introduced. In typical cases, and when all goes well, an act of attention to an object accompanies, or perhaps is a constituent of, the introduction of an individual concept, which then has that object as its bearer. In cases in which all does not go well, for example in hallucination, an individual concept is used by the subject as if it had an object even though it does not; an act internally indistinguishable from an act of attending to an object occurs, and in that act an individual concept without a bearer comes into being. A concept so introduced can be used in thought; for example an individual concept C  can be a component in wondering whether C is real or merely hallucinated. In less typical cases, it is known to the subject that the concept has no bearer. An example would be a case in which I know I am hallucinating.     
    External singularity is relational: a subject is related to an object. Internal singularity is not relational in this way. (301, bolding added.)
 
What interests me here is the notion of an individual concept (IC). We are told above that an IC is distinct from its bearer and can exist without a bearer.  So the existence and identity of an IC does not depend on its having a bearer. We are also told that one and the same IC can figure in both a veridical and a non-veridical  (hallucinatory) experience, the seeing of a dagger, say.  So it is not the bearer that individuates the IC. What individuates it is the mental event by which it is introduced.
 
To these two points I add a third: it is built into the sense of 'individual concept' that if an individual concept C has a bearer, then it has exactly one bearer in the actual world, and the same bearer in every  possible world in which it has a bearer.  So if there is an individual concept SOCRATES, and it has a bearer, then it has exactly one bearer, Socrates, and not possibly anything distinct from Socrates.  This implies that individual concepts of externally singular items are as singular in content as the items of which they are the concepts. This in turn implies that no individual concept of an externally singular item is general:  no such concept is multiply instantiable or multiply 'bearable.'
 
I now add a fourth point: concepts are mental entities in the sense that they cannot exist apart from minds. Concepts are representations and therefore mental entities in the sense indicated.  A fifth point is that our minds are finite and our powers of conceptualization correspondingly limited. One obvious limit on our power to conceptualize is that no concept of ours can capture or grasp the haecceity (thisness) of any externally singular item.  We ectypal intellects cannot conceptually eff the ineffable, where what is ineffable is the individual in its individuality or singularity or haecceity, i.e.,  in that which makes it be this individual and no other actual or possible individual.  God, the archetypal intellect, may be able to grasp the haecceity of an individual, but this is clearly beyond our 'pay grade.' If God can do it, this is presumably because he creates the individual ex nihilo.
 
It follows from the fourth and fifth points that all of our concepts are general.  Suppose that the concept FASTEST MARATHONER (FM) applies to Jones. That concept is general despite the fact that at any given time t only one person can instantiate or bear it.   For at times earlier and later than t, some other runners were and will be the FM.  Therefore, FM does not capture Jones' haecceity. But even if Jones is the FM at every time in the actual world, there are possible worlds in which some other person is the FM at every time. What's more, at any time at which Jones is the FM, he might not have been the FM at that time.
 
Sainsbury's theory of individual concepts strikes me as incoherent.  The following cannot all be true:
 
1) There are individual concepts.
2) Concepts are representations in finite minds, and our minds are finite.
3) Individual concepts of externally singular items must be as singular in content as the items of which they are the concepts.
4) Every externally singular item exists. (There are no 'exotica.')
5) Every externally singular item is wholly determinate or complete where x is complete =df x  satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (tertium non datur).
6) No concept in a finite mind of an externally singular item is singular in content in the sense of encoding every property of the wholly determinate or complete thing of which it is the concept.
7) One and the same individual concept can figure in both a veridical and a non-veridical  (hallucinatory) experience.
 
Sainsbury is committed to each of these seven propositions, and yet they cannot all be true. The first five propositions, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of (6).   Or if (6) is true, then (1) is false.  (6) and (7) cannot both be true.
 
I conclude that there are no individual concepts, and that the distinction between externally singular and internally singular object-directed mental states cannot be upheld.  

Two Related Political Mistakes

1) One is the idea that we can all live together and get along despite deep differences in language, race, religion, culture, political convictions and basic values.  This, the contemporary liberal position, either is or tends towards the idea that there are no limits on productive and mutually beneficial interaction among  very different types of people.   It  either is or tends toward the conceit that a viable One can be made out of any Many. This is e pluribus unum taken to an extreme and reduced to absurdity. The Latin dictum on our coinage has a rather more moderate meaning: it means that out of  many individuals and geographical regions and states one nation can arise, provided that there are deep commonalities of language, culture, religion, and values. Whose values? Well, not the values of sharia-supporting Muslims whose values are antithetical to traditional American values which are, in the main, the values of the Enlightenment.  The Founders, for example, were anti-theocratic but not anti-religious. 

2) The other mistake is the idea is that those who have, or believe they have,  a superior worldview are justified in imposing it on others, by force if necessary, for their own good.  Forced religious conversion is one form of this. A second is the ill-starred attempt at nation building which has played a central role in the current debacle in Afghanistan.  You cannot impose upon people whose backward culture is downstream from an inferior religion a way of life that cuts against their grain and for which they lack the prerequisites. They would have had to have gone through something like our Enlightenment to to be able to benefit from our tutelage when it comes to setting up a viable system of governance.  

3) The two mistakes may seem to pull in opposite directions. The first presupposes that we are all the same, have the same values, and want the same things.  The second presupposes that some need to be 'straightened out' and taught the right way of doing things. But the mistakes share a common element, that it would be good to bring people together and that it is possible to do so. This is a failure to understand that there are irreconcilable differences. There is no way we can straighten out the Taliban and teach them how to live, especially when we are collapsing under the weight of our own decadence.  'Woke' madness and Western decadence is no cure for Islamist fanaticism any more than National Socialism is the cure for Communism.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: September Songs

September already.  A transitional month leading from hot August to glorious October, Kerouac month in the MavPhil 'secular liturgy.'

Dinah Washington, September in the Rain

Rod Stewart, Maggie May. "Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you/It's late September and I really should be back at school."

Carole King, It Might as Well Rain Until September

The 'sixties forever! We were young, raw, open, impressionable, experience-hungry; we lived intensely and sometimes foolishly.  We felt deeply, and suffered deeply. Youth has its truth. And our popular music put to shame the crap that came before and after. Or so we thought. Would I want to live though the 'sixties again? Hell no, I am having too good a time enjoying it memorially at a safe distance.  Youth has its truth, but if you can make it into old age with health and intellect intact, and a modicum of the lean green, you are winning the game. 

Django Reinhardt, September Song

George Shearing, September in the Rain

Walter Huston, September Song 

Van Morrison, September Night

Brothers Four, Try to Remember. I do remember when I was "a tender and callow fellow." 

Addendum

This from a London reader:

Thanks for linking to the George Shearing ‘September’. I had forgotten he grew up in London (in Battersea, just down the road from me). I love the Bird-like flights on the piano. Indeed I think he wrote ‘Lullaby of Birdland’. Another Londoner is Helen Shapiro who does a great version of ‘It might as well rain until September.’  Great alto voice, never made it in the US as far as I know. There is an  account of her conversion to Christianity here.

I was first hipped to Shearing by Kerouac who referred to him in On the Road.  I too love the 'Bird'-like flights on the piano. The allusion is to Charley 'Bird' Parker, also beloved of Kerouac.  Helen Shapiro is new to me, thanks. She does a great job with the Carole King composition.  Believe it or not, King's version is a demo. That's one hell of a demo. A YouTuber points out that Shapiro was not part of the 1964 'British Invasion.'  I wonder why.